Just three years after Challenger, the Cold War is over.

So is the space race.

While one generation has dreamed of their future in outer space,

the next will create theirs on a new frontier:

Cyberspace.

Individual, entrepreneurial ideas, run wild.

And that really is the American spirit.

And it's a way to figure out how to fully utilize something that's out there.

In 1873, on his kitchen table,

an Illinois farmer called Joseph Gliden

invents something that changes the face of America:Barbed wire.

Within ten years, over half a million miles of barbeded wire

parcels up a billion acres of the Midwest

and turns open prairie into the breadbasket of America.

1879, Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb.

It will generate a further 1,000 patents.

But he also creates the first commercial power grid.

Within two years, he sets up 5,000 power plants.

In five more, he creates a further

127,000 electric light and power across the nation.

We're a nation of entrepreneurs.

We have this incredible entrepreneurial spirit.

But one 19th century American invention

introduces an idea that will shape our 21st century World.

In 1850,the Lowell cotton mills are automated with paper punch cards.

The holes in the cards instruct the loom to use different coloured threads,

switching one color on, one color off.

It's binary code

and the key to the future computer revolution.